In which we come face to face with fairy shrimp, caddisflies, and glistening salamander egg masses. Happy spring!

The Sky Is Clear, But It's Raining Donald Britton Under the trees, where everything Is still possible in prescribed doses: Hundreds of accordion-like units Without edges. But there is no unwinding Of minutes to stay the execution Of a rain-shot weekend in early Beach weather, no elixir To revive the amputated flower Still kicking on its ghost-stem In a bowl of water, no direction In which to steer The hapless, puzzled out-of-towner Other than straight ahead, To the sheer drop-off Where his guidebook gutters Or deposits him, addressless, In thin air.

Atmospherics Susan Hutton

Sometimes on a late clear night you can pull that station from Denver or Boston out of the dark.

All the elsewheres alter here, as what you remember changes what you think.

Not spider nor plum nor pebble possess any of the names we give them.

A kite tugging on its string gives you a sense of what's up there, though it is translated, and by a string.

Out there, in the dark, the true thing.

A Story About Dying Kevin Prufer The old cat was dying in the bushes. Its breaths came slow, slow,                                          and still it looked out over the sweetness of the back lawn, the swaying of tall grass in the hot wind, the way sunlight warmed the garbage can’s sparkling lid.                     It closed its hot eyes, then struggled them open again. + In unison, the dogs explained themselves to the passing freight train. + I don’t know where it’s gone, her husband said without looking up from his paper while she stood on the back porch shaking the food bowl, calling one of its names.   + All this the dying old cat observed from beneath the bushes, its head sideways in the grass, its fur wet where the dog had caught it in its teeth. + And now there’s another train, and the dogs are explaining themselves again.   + The food makes that sparkling sound in the metal bowl and the cat tries to lift its body from the grass but it’s feeling hollowed out, empty and strange as though it’s floating just above the tips of grass, as if its paws barely touch the blades’ rich points. + Sometimes, the dogs explain themselves to each other, or to passing cars, but mostly they address the trains. We are powerful dogs, they say,                                            but we are also good, while the children on bikes, while the joggers, while the vast, mysterious trains                                              pass them by. + The cat is still drifting above the grass tips, and the sun is so bright the yard sparkles, and wouldn’t it be nice to rest there on the garbage can’s hot lid, there by the potted plant, there on the car’s hood? But it wants the food glittering in the metal bowl, the food that, also, drifts above the grass tips. + And then the cat floats down the tracks, the train’s long call a whistling in its head. + And the dogs explain themselves to it, we are good dogs, good dogs,                                        as the cat grows impossibly far away, we are good dogs, as the cat is almost a memory,   is barely a taste in the mouth of one of the chorus.

Archaeology at Midnight Martha McFerren

His knees drawn up, my husband lies asleep, so like Tollund Man—the sacrifice found pickled in a bog. He sinks night-deep, a similar repose upon his face.

Always I’ve dreamed of archaeology, the pots and beads that decorate a death; the gold. Poor health, an inability  to master language, and general sloth

all kept me back. I also lacked the spleen for its vendettas: who’d become whose mentor; the provenance of jumbled figurines; a major stew about each little splinter.

But in the dark I dream about the altars. Knossos with the roof off. Newgrange. Malta.

Vagrants and Loiterers Kwame Dawes

South Carolina, c.1950

You got that clean waistcoat, the bright white of a well-tailored shirt, you got those loose-as-sacks slacks and some spit-polished shoes, and you know, whether you are looking like money, or about to take a stroll, to tilt that hat like you own the world; yeah, smoke your pipe, roll your tobacco, and hold loose as authority, your muscles, lithe and hard; and every so often, when you feel the urge, you reach into the waist pocket and pull out that watch on its chain, then look in the sky and say Gonna be a cold one when it come, like God gave you that fancy clock to tell the future. These are the easy boys of the goodly South; waiting for what is out of frame to happen: the sheriff with his questions, the paddy wagon, the chain gang, the weight of the world. Waiting, with such delicate dignity, fickle as the seasonal sky.

Waking at the Mouth of the Willow River Don McKay

Sleep, my favourite flannel shirt, wears thin, and shreds, and birdsong happens in the holes. In thirty seconds the naming of species will begin. As it folds into the stewed latin of afterdream each song makes a tiny whirlpool. One of them, zoozeezoozoozee, seems to be making fun of sleep with snores stolen from comic books. Another hangs its teardrop high in the mind, and melts: it was, after all, only narrowed air, although it punctuated something unheard, perfectly. And what sort of noise would the mind make, if it could, here at the brink? Scritch, scritch. A claw, a nib, a beak, worrying its surface. As though, for one second, it could let the world leak back to the world. Weep.